


Purple Nails

by ladyknight27



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 11:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5665048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyknight27/pseuds/ladyknight27
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After returning from Carthak, Alanna tells her children a bit too much about Ozorne's court.</p>
<p>Set just after Emperor Mage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purple Nails

After the first time Thom heard a Lioness story from one of Pirate’s Swoop’s guardsmen, Alanna decided that she would much rather tell her children the stories of her exploits personally. Not that she liked singing her own praises- she rather hated it, in fact- but she didn’t think she could handle hearing her oldest chirp, “Mama! Did you really kill Chitral with nothing but your bare hands in a blizzard and then walk back down with the Dominion Jewel?” one more time. If her children were going to grow up with a hero for a mother, the least she could do was make sure they had their facts right. 

So upon her return from Carthak, Alanna and George went up to the nursery to put Thom, Aly, and Alan to bed. “Mama! Mama!” they squealed, bouncing on their beds. They had clearly not gotten over the fact that she was home again. “Did you really change the Emperor into a Stormwing? Did you burn the palace down?  
It must have been AWESOME.” That was Alan, who was in his bloodthirsty phase as a six-year-old. 

“I heard there were dinosaurs,” added Thom, the scholarly one.

“Tell me about the palace! What do they look like? What did the Emperor wear? Did you find out any of the spies he set on you?” asked Aly. As usual, she mixed a disconcerting girlishness with an indication that she spent way too much time with her father. 

Alanna sighed. George was the only one who could have told them what had just happened in Carthak. She shot him a glare, but smiled when he winked at her.

“Hush now, and listen to your mother,” he said laughingly.

The story, even abridged, took close to an hour. When the children were drowsy, and Alanna and George were getting up to leave, Aly grabbed at her fingers. “You’ll be here tomorrow, right, Mama?”

Of course, the next day Aly wanted to play Carthak. She had been fascinated by the descriptions of opulence from the night before, especially Ozorne’s, and had apparently spent the whole morning chattering about it to Maude. This was how Alanna found herself trying to hold still while Maude patiently applied a tiny brush to the nails of her right hand.

“Ozorne had gilded nails, you said, but Maude said we don’t have extra gold. But she made nail paint for us, see?” squealed Aly excitedly. “She let me pick, so I said purple ‘cuz of your Gift. I woulda said brown for Da, too, but that’s not pretty.” 

“Purple is a very pretty color,” Alanna agreed, half-laughing. “I like it better than brown too.” As Maude finished with her right hand, Alanna went to run it through her hair, and was startled to find that she couldn’t.

“Don’t do that, or I’ll smack you, grown though you are.” Maude held her wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. “If you touch anything in the next few minutes, you’ll muss your nails, and probably get paint on everything. Even Aly there had the sense not to.”

Alanna sighed and lowered her hand. She had no idea where her daughter got her understanding of how to handle what she still sometimes thought of as “girly things,” but she was always a little embarrassed to be caught making mistakes a six-year-old wouldn’t.

Over supper with George that night, she kept getting distracted by flashes of color at the edge of her vision. Every time she lifted a fork or gestured, she could see the purple on her nails, and it was driving her crazy.

The tenth time she twitched and stopped mid-sentence, George started laughing. “It’s the nail paint, isn’t it?” he chuckled. “I have no idea why you let Aly subject you to that.”

Dejected, Alanna put her palms flat on the table and stared at her hands. “It just looks… wrong,” she muttered. “Aly was having so much fun, and I’d seen other ladies at court do it, but… it’s not like cosmetics. I can’t see my own face and get distracted by my eye paint.”

George smiled at her. “It does look a little silly on you, lass. So does this mean you’re not ready to convert the Swoop into Carthak City just yet?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “I was planning on visiting the builders tomorrow, my dear. What do you think of a nice, big, open porch where your side of our bedroom used to be? Should be ready in time for winter.” She absent-mindedly drew her belt-knife and began to chip at the paint on her left hand.

“Don’t do that,” George chided. “Wouldn’t want you to lose a finger. Imagine what people would say about the Lioness then!” She rammed her knife back into its sheath, grumbling under her breath. “And only think how sad Aly would be,” he added wickedly.

“Oh, all right, I’ll leave it. For a few days, at least,” Alanna conceded crossly. 

The nail paint lasted a bit longer than that, as Maude discovered that there was no easy way to get it off. Finally, Alanna settled for charming her nails so she couldn’t see the paint- she could’ve spelled it off entirely, but she didn’t want to hurt Aly’s feelings. Her daughter, on the other hand, could not have been happier that her nails would be “pretty” for weeks. 

She forgot all about it after a few days, and upon her next trip to Corus, was surprised when Jon pulled her aside for a quick word.

“Alanna, don’t get mad-” he started carefully, “but did you hurt your hands somehow? Slam your fingers in a door, miss a block with the staff?”

“What are you talking about?” Alanna said. Jon was occasionally over-protective, but this was just weird.

“It’s just that- the bases of your fingernails are all purple, like you’re bruised, only you’ve never been that clumsy,” he went on.

Alanna went white and then red with embarrassment. She’d been sitting through important councils all day with traces of a six-year-old girl’s foolishness on her hands? “Oh, gods,” she muttered. “I forgot about the nail paint.”

“Nail paint?” he sputtered, clearly enjoying himself. “You’re wearing nail paint?” His whoops of laughter followed her halfway through the palace as she turned on her heel and stormed away from him. As she began taking the color off each nail using an unnecessarily powerful spell, Alanna vowed to be very, very careful about what she told her daughter ever again.


End file.
